Broadband coverage

BT’s has today announced that its Openreach and EE businesses will spend around six billion pounds between them over the next three years, in the first phase of a plan to extend superfast broadband and 4G coverage beyond 95% of the UK by 2020.

The announcement focuses on services, coverage and capacity with the latter receiving the most press coverage. As well as confirming their ambition of supplying 12 million premises with ultrafast broadband, BT announced that at least two million of those to be connected with Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology. (more…)

In what Openreach describes as “one of the fastest deployments of fibre broadband in the world???, it announced yesterday that its fibre network has passed the 25 million premises milestone, helping to take the UK’s superfast broadband (24Mbit/s) coverage past 90% of premises.

On Monday 14 March, the Broadband Stakeholder Group hosted an event to discuss the Government’s intention to make sure that “every home and business can have access to fast broadband by the end of this Parliament???. The event explored how any target for universal coverage should be framed, the actions needed to meet that target and what lessons can be learned from other countries.

A survey recently conducted by EEF (the Manufacturers’ Association) in the last quarter of 2015 found that the majority of respondents consider internet connectivity increasingly central to their operations and a boost to their productivity. Whilst the research found that the current infrastructure is adequate to meet their current business needs, manufacturers are concerned about the UK’s potential to compete at international level; the EEF claims that Britain’s success in leading the fourth industrial revolution depends on improvements to affordability and internet infrastructure.

Pushing for Universal Broadband Coverage: What do we mean and how do we get there?

The Government has announced its intention to make sure that “every home and business can have access to fast broadband by the end of this Parliament???. This would go beyond the current BDUK targets for superfast broadband to 95% of premises and build on the Universal Service Obligation of 2 Mbit/s. This event will bring together industry and policy makers to discuss how best to facilitate coverage to the areas which are by definition the least commercially viable, with the debate including issues such as public funding, State Aid, community-led scheme, debt-financing and the creation of a Universal Service Obligation.